This bill would require websites and technology firms to share user information with the government if the government wants the information to response to a cyber threat. Critics of the bill say it is similar to Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which did not pass the Senate two years ago.

If you can’t lock your door, you can’t maintain the privacy of your home. If you can’t encrypt your phone, you can’t keep your personal data private, either. As tech companies and law enforcement agencies clash over encryption, security and privacy, a former Bush administration official is coming down forcefully on the side of technology that supports civil liberties rather than erodes them. Michael Chertoff, who served under President George W. Bush as the nation's second Secretary of Homeland Security, suggested to The Huffington Post that using encryption to keep your data or messages personal is like having a quiet, private conversation between friends. "If I pull you off into a corner and talk to you privately about something, it’s not recorded," he said. "We don’t record conversations in public places so that people can’t whisper to each other and then not tell the authorities what they talked about. That’s not our culture." Law enforcement and intelligence agencies do, of course, record other conversations. Warrantless surveillance of phone records and the Internet significantly expanded under Bush and then President Barack Obama, until former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked information about the secret programs, galvanizing reforms of the Patriot Act. The U.S. government experienced its own security breach earlier this year, when the Office of Personnel Management disclosed that China-based hackers had reportedly stolen clearance information for millions of federal employees, including more than 5 million fingerprints. Now, the Obama administration is facing growing pressure to support strong encryption in the United States, with a broad coalition of civil liberties and privacy advocates petitioning the White House to make a strong public statement in favor of improved security to protect personal information, mobile devices and business secrets from hacking or loss. In a recent episode of HuffPost Live, advocates discussed the issues and points of contention. HuffPost spoke with Chertoff, who now runs a risk management and security consulting firm, this September. The following interview, which touches on technology, spying, privacy and legislative reforms, has been edited for length and clarity. We've seen huge data breaches in the private sector, but the hack of the Office of Personnel Management looks like the most serious breach of confidential data I can recall. What fallout are you seeing from it? As to the OPM breach, I agree with you. A number of commentators think that this is less about criminality and more about trying to do, essentially, a database of American citizens, which should be useful for intelligence purposes. That is a huge step forward, in terms of the kind of espionage that they do traditionally. Beyond that, there’s an emerging ability to corrupt or destroy data, or interfere with the operation of control systems which goes far beyond getting your personal information erased. It is actually potentially disruptive for physical objects or the death of human beings. I think it is a much broader problem than just the data breach privacy discussion that we’ve been having. As we multiply the number of devices that are connected, often without much consideration of security, I think it’s only going to become a bigger and bigger issue. Is there a proportionate response to this kind of espionage, in terms of China? Do you support enacting economic sanctions for such actions? First of all, separate the two types of espionage. I’m very traditional in taking the view that commercial espionage by government is inappropriate. I think the administration talked about some kind of sanctions for companies that benefit from intellectual property, and that’s an unusual approach. It gets trickier when you get to national security espionage. You protest against it. If you find someone who does it, it’s appropriate to prosecute them. Frankly, that really worked in the Cold War. The Russians did it to our spies, too. It’s a little hard to get worked up into a moral outrage, because what the Chinese have done with respect to OPM, at least in my view, is a variation on a traditional theme of gathering intelligence, but they’ve been able to scale it up. Our biggest response has got to be to protect our assets. I think the most serious disappointment in the OPM breach is it appears people didn’t even take the steps that they were told to take to reach a minimum level of security. They utterly missed the fact that they were holding very valuable information. They viewed themselves as if they were like a great big HR department. We need to have a bigger understanding of the value of data, so that people understand that it’s not just credit cards that matter. There’s all kinds of information that can be useful to an adversary or competitor that needs to be protected. What steps should average businesses and citizens take, with respect to protecting their own information? What tools should we have available to us? Obviously, encryption of data in motion and data at rest is a very useful tool. Not everything needs to be connected to everything else. How do you handle administrative privileges? Who gets to set conditions of access and things of that sort? How do you internally monitor the perimeters or anomalous behavior, or something that’s happened that’s inexplicable? Use a number of different techniques. You’re not totally eliminating the risk, but you’re reducing the risk and you’re managing it. That mitigates a lot of that potential damage from these kinds of attacks. Risk is an important word, in this context. The FBI and the Justice Department are asking citizens to accept the idea that we should put ourselves at more risk through weakening encryption so that they can access our mobile devices if they have a warrant. What’s your position? I think even with [strong] encryption, there would be plenty of other ways that law enforcement and judges can use to protect us. That’s always been the case traditionally. In the old days, back when I was doing cases as a prosecutor, they didn't talk very much. We were still able to make cases using other techniques. I understand what the motivation of the FBI and the law enforcement people is, but I think it’s misguided for a number of reasons. To believe that if you have a law to require a duplicate key or a key escrow, that bad people wouldn’t find another way to make their messages disappear, even if they had to go to technologies and providers from other parts of the world? Frankly, that’s the world we’ve always lived in. Would bills like the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 or the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, both designed to promote voluntary information sharing between the private sector and government, help with these kinds of issues? There are a couple areas where I think legislation would be useful. One, I think it would be promoting information [sharing] by creating liability protection for people who share information in an appropriate way both with the government and also among themselves, making sure that what they share is confidential so that they don’t feel constrained about giving information about attacks. Updating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act will eliminate an anomaly between how we treat interception of email that’s current versus stored email, which is a distinction that maybe made sense when the statute was passed many years ago, but has lost its logic. That would go some way in promoting a greater sense of reassurance about privacy, and that’s certainly an important part of the discussion. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act also poses issues for the security research community. People are concerned, with some justification, that if they do research on government or commercial websites, they could be held liable or even prosecuted. Should there be any reform of the law, in your view? I’m not aware anybody has been prosecuted for doing research, so I don’t know how much of a problem that is. I think, in general, with newer technology, statutes that are 10 years or 20 years old often make no sense, simply because they were drafted at a time when the architecture was radically different from what we have today. These things ought to have an expiration date. What frustrates you about what Congress and the press say about technology and security? To me, the most frustrating thing is when people treat privacy and security as if they are trade-offs. I think you can’t have privacy without security. If by privacy we mean, "you give me your information, and I’m gonna make sure it’s treated in a proper way," that promise is meaningless if I can’t enforce it. If somebody can hack into my data, it doesn’t matter what I promised you. It’s going out the door anyway. At the same time, without privacy, we can’t be secure. Security is to be able to keep data, to keep control of data that you’ve generated that is relevant to you. I would like to see less of an oppositional approach and more taking a view that these things are actually interdependent and mutually reinforcing. -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

John W. WhiteheadActivist Post“The game is rigged, the network is bugged, the government talks double-speak, the courts are complicit and there’s nothing you can do about it.”—David Kravets, reporting for WiredNothing you write, say, text, tweet or share via phone or computer is private anymore. As constitutional law professor Garrett Epps points out, “Big Brother is watching…. Big Brother may be watching you right now, and you may never know. Since 9/11, our national life has changed forever. Surveillance is the new normal.”This is the reality of the internet-dependent, plugged-in life of most Americans today.A process which started shortly after 9/11 with programs such as Total Information Awareness (the predecessor to the government’s present surveillance programs) has grown into a full-fledged campaign of warrantless surveillance, electronic tracking and data mining, thanks to federal agents who have been given carte blanche access to the vast majority of electronic communications in America. Their methods completely undermine constitution safeguards, and yet no federal agency, president, court or legislature has stepped up to halt this assault on our rights.For the most part, surveillance, data mining, etc., is a technological, jargon-laden swamp through which the average American would prefer not to wander. Consequently, most Americans remain relatively oblivious to the government’s ever-expanding surveillance powers, appear unconcerned about the fact that the government is spying on them, and seem untroubled that there is no way of opting out of this system. This state of delirium lasts only until those same individuals find themselves arrested or detained for something they did, said or bought that runs afoul of the government’s lowering threshold for what constitutes criminal activity.(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); All the while, Congress, the courts, and the president (starting with George W. Bush and expanding exponentially under Barack Obama) continue to erect an electronic concentration camp the likes of which have never been seen before.A good case in point is the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), formerly known as CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act). Sold to the public as necessary for protecting us against cyber attacks or internet threats such as hacking, this Orwellian exercise in tyranny-masquerading-as-security actually makes it easier for the government to spy on Americans, while officially turning Big Business into a government snitch.Be warned: this cybersecurity bill is little more than a wolf in sheep’s clothing or, as longtime critic Senator Ron Wyden labeled it, “a surveillance bill by another name.”Lacking any significant privacy protections, CISA, which sacrifices privacy without improving security, will do for surveillance what the Patriot Act did for the government’s police powers: it will expand, authorize and normalize the government’s intrusions into the most intimate aspects of our lives to such an extent that there will be no turning back. In other words, it will ensure that the Fourth Amendment, which protects us against unfounded, warrantless government surveillance, does not apply to the Internet or digital/electronic communications of any kind.In a nutshell, CISA would make it legal for the government to spy on the citizenry without their knowledge and without a warrant under the guise of fighting cyberterrorism. It would also protect private companies from being sued for sharing your information with the government, namely the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in order to prevent “terrorism” or an “imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm.”Law enforcement agencies would also be given broad authority to sift through one’s data for any possible crimes. What this means is that you don’t even have to be suspected of a crime to be under surveillance. The bar is set so low as to allow government officials to embark on a fishing expedition into your personal affairs—emails, phone calls, text messages, purchases, banking transactions, etc.—based only on their need to find and fight “crime.”Take this anything-goes attitude towards government surveillance, combine it with Big Business’ complicity over the government’s blatantly illegal acts, the ongoing trend towards overcriminalization, in which minor acts are treated as major crimes, and the rise of private prisons, which have created a profit motive for jailing Americans, and you have all the makings of a fascist police state.So who can we count on to protect us from the threat of government surveillance?It won’t be the courts. Not in an age of secret courts, secret court rulings, and an overall deference by the courts to anything the government claims is necessary to its fight against terrorism. Most recently, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a case challenging the government’s massive electronic wiretapping program. As Court reporter Lyle Denniston notes:Daoud v. United States was the first case, in the nearly four-decade history of electronic spying by the U.S. government to gather foreign intelligence, in which a federal judge had ordered the government to turn over secret papers about how it had obtained evidence through wiretaps of telephones and Internet links. That order, however, was overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, whose ruling was the one the Justices on Monday declined to review…. One of the unusual features of the government’s global electronic spying program is that the individuals whose conversations or e-mails have been monitored almost never hear about it, because the program is so shrouded in secrecy — except when the news media manages to find out some details. But, if the government plans to use evidence it gathered under that program against a defendant in a criminal trial, it must notify the defendant that he or she has been monitored.It won’t be Congress, either (CISA is their handiwork, remember), which has failed to do anything to protect the citizenry from an overbearing police state, all the while enabling the government to continue its power grabs. It was Congress that started us down this whole Big Brother road with its passage and subsequent renewals of the USA Patriot Act, which drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights. The Patriot Act rendered First Amendment activists potential terrorists; justified broader domestic surveillance; authorized black bag “sneak-and-peak” searches of homes and offices by government agents; granted the FBI the right to come to your place of employment, demand your personal records and question your supervisors and fellow employees, all without notifying you; allowed the government access to your medical records, school records and practically every personal record about you; allowed the government to secretly demand to see records of books or magazines you’ve checked out in any public library and Internet sites you’ve visited.The Patriot Act also gave the government the green light to monitor religious and political institutions with no suspicion of criminal wrongdoing; prosecute librarians or keepers of any other records if they told anyone that the government had subpoenaed information related to a terror investigation; monitor conversations between attorneys and clients; search and seize Americans’ papers and effects without showing probable cause; and jail Americans indefinitely without a trial, among other things.And it certainly won’t be the president. Indeed, President Obama recently issued an executive order calling on private companies (phone companies, banks, Internet providers, you name it) to share their customer data (your personal data) with each other and, most importantly, the government. Here’s the problem, however: while Obama calls for vague protections for privacy and civil liberties without providing any specific recommendations, he appoints the DHS to oversee the information sharing and develop guidelines with the attorney general for how the government will collect and share the data.Talk about putting the wolf in charge of the hen house.Mind you, this is the same agency, rightly dubbed a “wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast,” that is responsible for militarizing the police, weaponizing SWAT teams, spying on activists, stockpiling ammunition, distributing license plate readers to state police, carrying out military drills in American cities, establishing widespread surveillance networks through the use of fusion centers, funding city-wide surveillance systems, accelerating the domestic use of drones, and generally establishing itself as the nation’s standing army, i.e., a national police force.This brings me back to the knotty problem of how to protect Americans from cyber attacks without further eroding our privacy rights.Dependent as we are on computer technology for almost all aspects of our lives, it’s feasible that a cyberattack on American computer networks really could cripple both the nation’s infrastructure and its economy. So do we allow the government liberal powers to control and spy on all electronic communications flowing through the United States? Can we trust the government not to abuse its privileges and respect our privacy rights? Does it even matter, given that we have no real say in the matter?As I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, essentially, there are three camps of thought on the question of how much power the government should have, and which camp you fall into says a lot about your view of government—or, at least, your view of whichever administration happens to be in power at the time, for the time being, the one calling the shots being the Obama administration.In the first camp are those who trust the government to do the right thing—or, at least, they trust the Obama administration to look out for their best interests. To this group, CISA is simply a desperately needed blueprint for safeguarding us against a possible cyberattack, with a partnership between the government and Big Business serving as the most logical means of thwarting such an attack. Any suggestion that the government and its corporate cohorts might abuse this power is dismissed as conspiratorial hysterics. The problem, as technology reporter Adam Clark Estes points out, is that CISA is a “privacy nightmare” that “stomps all over civil liberties” without making “the country any safer against cyberattacks.”In the second camp are those who not only don’t trust the government but think the government is out to get them. Sadly, they’ve got good reason to distrust the government, especially when it comes to abusing its powers and violating our rights. For example, consider that government surveillance of innocent Americans has exploded over the past decade. In fact, Wall Street Journal reporter Julia Angwin has concluded that, as a result of its spying and data collection, the U.S. government has more data on American citizens than the Stasi secret police had on East Germans. To those in this second group, CISA is nothing less than the writing on the wall that surveillance is here to stay, meaning that the government will continue to monitor, regulate and control all means of communications.Then there’s the third camp, which neither sees government as an angel or a devil, but merely as an entity that needs to be controlled, or as Thomas Jefferson phrased it, bound “down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution.” A distrust of all who hold governmental power was rife among those who drafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. James Madison, the nation’s fourth president and the author of the Bill of Rights, was particularly vocal in warning against government. He once observed, “All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.”To those in the third camp, the only way to ensure balance in government is by holding government officials accountable to abiding by the rule of law. Unfortunately, with all branches of the government, including the courts, stridently working to maintain its acquired powers, and the private sector marching in lockstep, there seems to be little to protect the American people from the fast-growing electronic surveillance state.In the meantime, surveillance has become the new normal, and the effects of this endless surveillance are taking a toll,resulting in a more anxious and submissive citizenry. As Fourth Amendment activist Alex Marthews points out,Mass surveillance is becoming a punchline. Making it humorous makes mass surveillance seem easy and friendly and a normal part of life…we make uneasy jokes about how we should watch what we say, about the government looking over our shoulders, about cameras and informers and eyes in the sky. Even though we may not in practice think that these agencies pay us any mind, mass surveillance still creates a chilling effect: We limit what we search for online and inhibit expression of controversial viewpoints. This more submissive mentality isn’t a side effect. As far as anyone is able to measure, it’s the main effect of mass surveillance. The effect of such programs is not primarily to thwart attacks by foreign terrorists on U.S. soil; it’s to discourage challenges to the security services’ authority over our lives here at home. Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute where this article first appeared. He is the author of A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State and The Change Manifesto.

After twice failing to pass the Cyber Intelligence Sharing & Protection Act (CISPA), Republican and Democrat leadership are thrilled that Obama is invoking it by Executive Order. CISPA’s “protection” is for companies who share your information, protecting them from criminal and civil... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://FinanceArmageddon.blogspot.com or http://www.newsbooze.com or http://www.figanews.com for full links, other content, and more! ]]

1) Why we are most likely to have a market crash like 2000 and 2008(2) The European problems, and how they are likely to occur here.(3) Why he thinks there should be a CISPA bill (with many changes to it though), unlike many limited govt guys. The Financial Armageddon Economic Collapse Blog... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://FinanceArmageddon.blogspot.com or http://www.newsbooze.com or http://www.figanews.com for full links, other content, and more! ]]

CLAIM: “I urge this Congress to finally pass the legislation we need to better meet the evolving threat of cyber-attacks, combat identity theft, and protect our children’s information.” (President Obama, State of the Union Address, January 20, 2015)
FACT: For two consecutive Congresses, Republicans have led the charge and passed bipartisan reforms to bolster cybersecurity while protecting people’s privacy.
U.S. businesses – like Target, Home Depot, and most recently Sony – have been targeted by foreign nations and criminal organizations for cyber-attack and theft for years, resulting in huge losses of sensitive customer information and valuable trade secrets.
Though these attacks only continue to grow, our government still lacks clear legal authority to share classified information it gains about hackers, and potential threats with businesses. And, according to the House Intelligence Committee, “too often, companies that would like to share cyber threat information with other parts of the private sector or the government are prevented or deterred from doing so by a range of policy and legal barriers.”
Understanding the need for reform, Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor formed a Cybersecurity Task Force in the first months of the new GOP House majority, led by Rep. Thornberry, to evaluate what the House could do to help secure America’s technology infrastructures.
Recommendations from the Cybersecurity Task Force were incorporated into four bills designed to allow for information-sharing and public-private partnerships to help stop cyber threats. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (H.R. 3523), the Federal Information Security Amendments (H.R. 4257), the Cybersecurity Enhancement Act (H.R. 2096), and the Advancing America’s Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Act (H.R. 3834) all passed the House with bipartisan support in the 112th Congress, but the Democratic-controlled Senate refused to act.
In the 113th Congress, the House again passed a series of common-sense cybersecurity reforms in a bipartisan way. Two bills – versions of H.R. 2096 and H.R. 4257 – were eventually included in legislation signed into law by President Obama on December 18, 2014. However the most important measure – a re-introduced version of H.R. 3523, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (H.R. 624) – died once more in the Democratic-controlled Senate despite passing the House with a veto-proof bipartisan majority of 288 to 127 in April of 2013.
Republicans are again ready to work with both parties to address this important issue and put some common-sense measures to the president’s desk.
READ MORE:
Also #StuckInTheSenate: Tackling Cyber Crime to Protect Jobs
Speaker Boehner: Bipartisan Cybersecurity Bill Important For Homeland Security, American Jobs
Boehner: Cybersecurity Bill “Keeps the Government’s Hands Off the Internet,” Helps Our Economy
Boehner Op-Ed in IBD: New Bill Helps Businesses, Individuals Fight Cyberattacks
Speaker Boehner Praises New Cybersecurity Task Force Recommendations from Rep. Thornberry, GOP Members

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama is citing the cyberattack against Sony to drum up support for cybersecurity legislation that would expand information-sharing between private companies and the U.S. government. But privacy advocates say they have concerns about details of the proposal released so far. "The events over the past year ... culminating with the destructive and coercive attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, really highlight the growing threat that we face in cyberspace," a senior administration official said Tuesday in a conference call with reporters. The president also cited the Sony hack, believed to have been perpetrated by North Korea, when discussing his cybersecurity plan with members of Congress. Obama's proposal will encourage the private sector to share cyber threat information with the Department of Homeland Security’s National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center. According to the administration official, DHS will be required to share the information it receives in "near real-time" with "other federal agencies." The official said that the information would be limited to a narrow set of technical information, including date and time stamps, IP addresses and routing information. "It's primarily not going to be content," the official said. Under the proposal, companies that share this kind of cyber information with the government will be granted partial immunity from lawsuits from consumers in the event of security breaches. So far, the details released about the president's proposal haven't won over privacy advocates, especially since Congress has yet to pass comprehensive legislation that would reform the surveillance practices detailed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. "The status quo of overweening national security and law enforcement secrecy means that expanded information-sharing poses a serious risk of transferring more personal information to intelligence and law enforcement agencies," said Mark Jaycox, a legislative analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We believe that companies should maintain their current obligations to protect customer data," said Marc Rotenberg, president and executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "The government offering immunity for access to the data is not a good deal for users." Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), an advocate for NSA reform, told HuffPost in a statement that he was looking forward to reviewing the details of the proposal, but noted that "safeguarding Americans’ privacy is an essential prerequisite for any cybersecurity legislation." "Strong encryption and secure systems will always be the best first-line of defense against cyberattacks," he said. In contrast, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in a statement that information-sharing legislation is "an important step in improving cybersecurity." Amie Stepanovich, senior policy counsel at Access, an international human rights organization that advocates for digital rights, had not yet seen the full proposal but said it seemed more narrowly tailored than other congressional proposals -- such as CISPA, an information-sharing bill criticized for lacking privacy safeguards. But she pointed out that it was "premature" to pass information-sharing legislation before NSA reform. "A lot of this is tied to the Sony hack, but the problem with tying this to the Sony is that information-sharing legislation really wouldn't have stopped the Sony hack from occurring," she said. "It's kind of a non-sequitur."

Published every weekday, the Switchboard is your morning helping of hand-picked stories from the Switch team.House Dem revives major cyber bill. The Hill reports: "The measure — known as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) — has been a top legislative priority for industry groups and intelligence officials, who argue the country cannot properly defend critical infrastructure without it."Read full article >>

On this Friday, December 19 edition of the Alex Jones Show, Nightly News host David Knight delves into the latest on the Sony Pictures hack as the U.S. plans to blame North Korea and also China, Russia and Iran. Following the malware attack, lawmakers in the U.S. pushed to reinvigorate CISPA-style... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://FinanceArmageddon.blogspot.com or http://www.newsbooze.com or http://www.figanews.com for full links, other content, and more! ]] FREE SILVER ROUNDS sent directly to you when you subscribe to - and refer friends to - the SILVER SNOWBALL (click for free info) http://www.SlayTheBankster.com

This is the seventh post in our series exploring the jobs bills Senate Democrats are blocking. Previous posts can be read at speaker.gov/jobs.
Problem: The massive data breach at Home Depot – which may be much larger in scale than the one Target experienced last year – is yet another indication of the threat cybercrime poses to our economy. A recent study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found that cybercrime costs the U.S. economy roughly $100 billion per year. “Cybercrime is a tax on innovation and slows the pace of global innovation by reducing the rate of return to innovators and investors,” one CSIS expert said. “For developed countries, cybercrime has serious implications for employment.”
For all that, our government still lacks policies that match the enormity and urgency of the threat. “Too often,” the Intelligence Committee reports, “companies that would like to share cyber threat information with other parts of the private sector or the government are prevented or deterred from doing so by a range of policy and legal barriers.” In addition, the government doesn’t have clear legal authority to share the classified information it collects about foreign hackers.
Our Solution: Last April, the House passed H.R. 624, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, with a veto-proof bipartisan majority. After the vote, Speaker Boehner said:
“Stopping cyber-attacks by foreign countries like China as well as private criminal organizations is critical to keeping our homeland safe and protecting American jobs. This measure will help stop cyber-attacks by arming private-sector companies with government intelligence on cyber threats, while protecting the American people’s privacy.”
Senate Inaction: This July, the Senate Intelligence Committee passed a separate cybersecurity bill, but Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) hasn’t announced plans to take it up in the near future. Instead, Sen. Reid’s first order of business this month will be a constitutional amendment that he has used “as a way to bash the Koch brothers.”
Consequences: The Home Depot breach has renewed attention on how retailers spend less on cybersecurity than other industries. And small businesses – one out of every five of which fall victim to cybercrime – certainly don’t have the resources and infrastructure for this. By failing to act on cybersecurity, President Obama and Senate Democrats are missing an opportunity to show we recognize this threat and are determined to do all we can to protect our economy and our workers.
To learn more about this bill, read the text, and see how your representative voted, visit speaker.gov/jobs.